(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)
[S]amuel Thomson had every reason to hate doctors. They had killed his mother, he believed.
Thomson’s mother had fallen ill in 1790, perhaps suffering from tuberculosis. Several doctors examined her and diagnosed “galloping consumption.” The diagnosis, Thomson later remarked, was appropriate, “for (the doctors) are the riders, and their whip is mercury, opium, and vitriol, and they galloped her out of the world in about nine weeks.”
Thomson, a farmer and botanist who lived in New Hampshire and for a time in Vermont, was not alone in fearing the ministrations of doctors. In that era, doctors thought the best way to treat most illnesses was to bleed patients or to induce vomiting or defecation. The more that patients excreted, doctors seemed to believe, the sooner they would be restored to health.
Thomson and many others in Vermont developed their own ways of treating illnesses and injuries. Together, they created a richly diverse folk medicine tradition that served as an alternative to the treatments administered by so-called qualified physicians. While these conventional doctors preferred to administer strong, sometimes poisonous, substances to patients like Thomson’s mother, folk healers looked to herbal remedies as well as prayer and forms of magic.
Up through the mid-1800s, most Vermonters relied on midwives or skilled family members when they needed medical care.
Flora Livingston, of Hartland, cared for her family’s health. In a letter to her son, who was working on a farm in Fairlee, she offered medical advice. Her son suffered various symptoms, including nosebleeds, headaches and numbness in his hand. “I think your spine is affected,” Livingston wrote in 1857. “If you will be doctored for it then your back will get better.” She apparently wasn’t suggesting he consult a doctor, who were scarce in rural communities and beyond the means of poorer residents. Livingston was suggesting he take her advice.
She recommended that he rub his back each morning with cold water and then fine salt. For the nosebleeds, she prescribed bloodroot and red bath root, which he should grind together with alum and then sniff. She also mailed him slippery elm to drink. Until his nosebleeds were under control, she warned him against overexertion.
She added, “I do not think it is a good plan for you to wear tight boots or shoes on account of your nose bleeding so much.”
If those suggestions didn’t do the trick, she suggested he take some “shoemaker wax” and “put it on your foot – on the hollow of your foot.”
Livington based her prescription on long-held beliefs, according to research by Jane Beck, former executive director of the Vermont Folklife Center. Cold baths were believed to be helpful because they kept pores open; slippery elm was often prescribed to ease stomach complaints; comfortable boots were intended to ensure proper blood flow.
Livingston prescribed the roots, Beck said, because of her belief in sympathetic magic. The roots were the color of blood. Their redness showed their power to stop bleeding.
Folk healers also called upon so-called contagious magic, which used items with links to the patient’s body to effect a cure. Nail clippings or hair might do the trick. Or in an example cited by Beck, sore throat sufferers sometimes took their right sock, rubbed camphor on it and wrapped it around the neck.
Cures sometimes seemed almost worse than the ailments. One treatment for measles called for sheep manure to be steeped in cider. The liquid would then be strained and fed to the patient.
Some healers relied not on magic but on miracles. They used prayer and the laying on of hands to treat patients. One of the most famous was Henry Pare, who practiced during the mid-20th century. Pare was the seventh son of a seventh son, which some believed gave him mystical powers. For his services, he charged only $1. To charge more, he said, would sap him of what he believed were his God-given powers.
Earl Fuller, of Rochester, said Pare cured his asthma by wiggling Fuller’s toes, rubbing his foot and touching his knee. The cure lasted seven years. When the asthma recurred, Fuller returned to Pare, who said he couldn’t help him again. Fuller, Pare said, had had some sort of operation that had cut the nerve he had worked on. Fuller was dumbstruck. He hadn’t mentioned the operation he had recently undergone and was sure that was what the healer was referring to.
Lucy Ainsworth Cook, of Montpelier, also impressed people as being clairvoyant. As a young woman in the 1840s, Cook had become seriously ill and seemed to go into a trance. While in this altered state, she told family members to gather certain herbs and administer them to her. Cook’s health improved and she became fully alert again. People credited the herbal concoction.
From that point, Cook became a local healer, known for re-entering a trancelike state to diagnose and treat illnesses. “Sleeping Lucy,” as she was called, was also said to set bones painlessly.
Many herbal remedies originated from Native Americans in the region. Native Americans often found multiple uses for the same plant. Take, for example, lobelia, which was used in at least two ways. Penobscots in Maine smoked it to ease asthma, while Iroquois in New York used it to treat syphilis.
Settlers learned what they could from the indigenous people, who had a deep knowledge of local plants, and then added their own folk remedies to create a sort of medical regime.
Plants were seen as easing all sorts of complaints. Healers prescribed chestnut leaves for whooping cough, blue violet for constipation, sunflower seeds for lung trouble, witch hazel for sore eyes, lady-slipper for spasms, and wild carrot for kidney complaints.
The remedies, passed down within families and communities over generations, must have been difficult to keep straight. Perhaps that explains the success of Samuel Thomson. After watching his mother die under — or perhaps because of — the care of doctors, Thomson began treating people with herbal remedies. Word of his successes brought patients to his door. Eventually he gave up farming to practice medicine full time.
As his fame grew, doctors grew wary. The medical profession was just being established during this period. In the early 1800s, Vermont physicians started creating medical schools and local medical societies. To join one of the new societies, however, practitioners did not have to attend one of the schools. Instead, they could train as apprentices, sometimes for as little as three years. This was at a time when blacksmiths had to apprentice for seven.
Threatened by Thomson’s rising fame, some doctors looked to undermine him. The conflict came to a head in 1809, when Thomson treated an ailing man in Newburyport, Massachusetts. The patient was apparently pretty far gone when Thomson arrived. When the man died soon thereafter, local doctors had Thomson arrested and charged with manslaughter. Thomson had poisoned the patient with lobelia, the doctors claimed.
During his trial, a witness ate a bit of the plant while on the stand, and the judge acquitted Thomson.
In 1813, Thomson patented his “botanical system” of medicine. At about this time, two of Vermont’s leading physicians were studying geology and meteorology for clues to the causes of epidemics.
Thomson offered families the lifetime rights to his patented remedies for $20. Not only was he trying to profit from his experimentation, Thomson was also trying to democratize health care. He wanted to take power away from the doctors and put it in the hands of the common folk. It was what many people wanted. The Thomsonian movement flourished, and its popularity spread south and west.
Thomson’s medicines no doubt produced mixed results. But if people at the time chose to remain loyal to his regime anyway, who could blame them? What better option did they have?
